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For more than 30 years, Robert Guediguian and his merry band of loyal actors made deeply humanistic films set among Marseille’s working class — sunlit, somewhat fanciful variations on Ken Loach’s grittier oeuvre. But as the bonds of worker solidarity have grown increasingly fragile, the director has transported his repertory of regulars into other times and spaces and, in “Ariane’s Thread,” squarely into dreamland. Though this joyful proletarian commedia dell’arte lacks the mythical dimension of Renoir’s “Golden Coach” or Fellini’s “8½,” and is unlikely even to enjoy the popularity of Guediguian’s “Marius and Jeanette” (1997), the helmer’s fans will not be disappointed.

Seemingly abandoned by friends and family on her birthday, Ariane (the helmer’s lifelong partner and muse, Ariane Ascaride), leaves her suburban apartment and winds up, sans money or phone, in a picturesque seaside restaurant. The place caters to an elderly clientele of habitués
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Hovering around the twenty-one to twenty-four feature film mark with at least a quarter of those films belonging to first time filmmakers, the Quinzaine des Realisateurs (a.k.a Directors’ Fortnight) has in the past couple of years, counted on a healthy supply of French, Spanish and Belgium produced film items, and has been geared towards the offbeat genre items as with last year’s edition curated by Edouard Waintrop and co. To be unveiled on the 22nd, as we attempted with our Critics’ Week predix, Blake Williams, Nicholas Bell and I (Eric Lavallee) are thinking out loud and hedging our bets on what the section might look like or what the programmers might be looking at for 2014. Here is our predictions overview:

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